Environmental pressures, climate change, biodiversity, species protection, and pollution.
Chen Ziyu of Wo Cui Yuan farm, Baoding, and Liu Gang of Xiao Liushu Farm, Shunyi, face total crop failure in maize, drowned vegetables, compacted soil. All they can do: turn the land, sun the soil, rush to plant cabbages. Who bears the cost of climate adaptation? Unanswered.
Since its 1991 discovery in Beijing, Italian cocklebur has spread to Liaoning, Hebei and beyond; 8% coverage can cut yields by 60%. Yue Xiaoxiao at the Beijing Xuanwu Youth Science and Technology Museum leads schoolchildren in a distribution and damage survey, inviting farmers to fill in a questionnaire.
At Sister Yan Ping’s Hundred-Herb Garden in Guigang, Guangxi, the Wogans went from heavy on every tree to utterly bare. Three months of picking fruit, planting cassava and going to market turned ecological agriculture into blisters on our hands and flea bites on our legs.
Foodthink is now recruiting for Editor, Communications and Media Operations, and two Programme Officer positions for the Lianhe Programme and Climate Change, seeking new partners in sustainable food and agriculture at its Zhichun Road office in Beijing.
Back in Shen County, Shandong, she found no vegetables tasting like childhood. Through Foodthink’s Ecological Agriculture Internship Programme, she spent three months at Xiqing Farm, Beijing, learning from farmer Wang Xin – from identifying fully ripe strawberries to understanding ecological balance – now planning an ecological apple orchard at home.
More than half a year since the November 2022 blizzard unseen in over a decade, Jiangbutas Village’s Kazakh pastoralists are still repaying fodder debts and tending frail herds, while slow-melting snow keeps pastures overdue for transhumance still withered and yellow.
Huanglongbing fells trees, citrus tristeza ruins saplings, agricultural inputs have doubled while fruit prices stall at 2.5 yuan a jin—over thirty years, fruit growers in a Gannan mountain village have lived a navel orange’s full arc, from funding a new house to an ever greater struggle.
From late May to early June, Lüwo Farm in Jingyang endured nearly two weeks of continuous rain. Abro wheat and spelt wheat suffered lodging, sprouting and mould, forcing farm owner Dahei to rush an early harvest, with yield dropping by roughly 20%.
China’s Acceptable Daily Intake for procymidone exceeds that of the EU, Japan and Australia; under contiguous high-tunnel cultivation of Chinese chives, growers apply preventive spraying every seven days, grey mould fungus resistance continues to rise, and adjusting residue limits cannot change a production model built on overuse.
The SCA flavour wheel’s reference foods skew towards Europe and North America, and woody and earthy flavours are labelled as negative, placing producing regions in Indonesia and India under pressure. Developing local flavour wheels and trusting your own tongue is a freer way to enjoy coffee.
